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Celebrating World Cancer Day in India on February 4, 2012. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

Progress against cancer is not accelerating—though it should be, with the knowledge and scientific advances available today. Changing this situation is not a challenge to be left on the doorstep of any single organization or sector. It’s the ultimate in shared challenges.

So—by working collaboratively across industry as well as with the academic, medical, health-care payer, and patient communities—the company I lead will try in a small way to be part of the solution. We’re calling our effort PACE, or Patient Access to Cancer care Excellence.

February 4 is World Cancer Day, making this an appropriate time to consider progress against cancer. And a major progress report based on official data was just released by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American Cancer Society (ACS), and other groups. Reading that report—not to mention the media coverage of it—can leave you scratching your head.

On the one hand, taking the long view, the report is encouraging. The United States’ death rate from cancer overall dropped by more than 20 percent in the last 20 years, adding up to 1.2 million lives saved. As John Seffrin, the head of ACS, put it: "We truly are creating more birthdays.”

On the other hand, the same report indicated that in the last ten years we’ve been holding our own rather than gaining ground on cancer. The overall decrease in deaths from cancer in the U.S. was about 1.8 percent a year for men and 1.5 percent a year for women during the period from 2005 to 2009. Not bad. But that’s virtually the same rate of progress as in the previous five-year period—clearly a disappointing finding in an era when other areas of science and technology seem to be moving forward in leaps and bounds.

There are sensible explanations for these contrasting findings. Yes, it’s important to understand that rates of progress vary greatly from cancer to cancer, making overall death rates less meaningful. For example, breast cancers moved in recent decades from being frequent killers to being more readily manageable and even curable, while pancreatic cancers remained stubbornly fatal.

It’s also true that lifestyle factors and cancer-screening efforts need to be considered on both sides of the equation. Clearly, for example, a significant drop in the percentage of Americans who smoke has led to declining incidence and therefore to declining death rates for a number of cancers. And timely screenings have improved the success of treatments for breast, prostate, colon, and other cancers. At the same time, obesity and other lifestyle factors that contribute to cancer, and lack of access to screenings and preventive care, remain major problems.

In the end, however, these explanations aren’t terribly satisfying for those of us who work to develop and market innovative cancer treatments. We’d like to see cancer death rates going down at an accelerating pace—as more effective medicines reach more and more patients in less and less time.

Last September in this column, I suggested a number of reforms that might help to achieve that outcome—including the streamlining of clinical research, the involvement of many more patients in clinical trials, and closer integration of diagnostics and treatment regulation. But it’s one thing to talk or write, and it’s another thing to step up. Lilly Oncology now aims to step up.

Our PACE effort will be but one small piece of the work that’s necessary. We know that. So we started by asking questions. PACE commissioned a six-country survey of the public as well as cancer patients and caregivers, to understand what people believe about cancer, access to treatment, the R&D process, cost issues, clinical trials and other important topics.

The findings often were surprising—confirming that many myths about cancer still persist. For example, about 40 percent of people surveyed still believe erroneously that cancer is one disease and that progress comes via major breakthroughs rather than small steps.

However, there’s also strong support for common-sense approaches to the fight against cancer, with majorities of more than 80 percent calling for greater collaboration across borders and key sectors. PACE also started by examining in a systematic way the current barriers to faster innovation and greater patient access to treatments, to figure out ways to add value rather than duplicate existing efforts. The initial opinion-survey results along with the overview of policy reforms can be found on www.PACENetwork.com together with much other background.

PACE will be met with skepticism. We know that too. One of the most sobering results of our global survey is that about 60 percent of people believe pharmaceutical companies are more interested in treating cancer than in finding cures for it. In other words, they believe that we want to maximize our earnings and not the health outcomes for society. My colleagues and I in industry could not disagree more, but we need to show this to be wrong and not just say it. PACE is one way to show this.

But the best way of all will be to seize the opportunities of a better climate for innovation and care—and deliver valuable breakthroughs to patients. And we’re determined to do just that.